The Zero Dark Thirty File
Lifting The Government's Shroud Over the Mission That Killed Osama bin Laden
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 410
Posted -- January 17, 2013
Edited by Nate Jones and Lauren Harper with Documents from Jeffery
Richelson and Barbara Elias
For more information contact:
Nate Jones, Freedom of Information Coordinator
202/994-7045 nsarchiv@gwu.edu
http://www.nsarchive.org
Washington, DC, January 17, 2013 -- The poster for the blockbuster movie
Zero Dark Thirty features black lines of redaction over the title, which
unintentionally illustrate the most accurate take-away from the film -
that most of the official record of the hunt for Osama bin Laden is still
shrouded in secrecy, according to the National Security Archive's ZD30
briefing book, posted today at www.nsarchive.org. The U.S. government's
recalcitrance over releasing information directly to the public about the
twenty-first century's most important intelligence search and military
raid, and its decision instead to grant the film's producers exclusive and
unprecedented access to classified information about the operation, means
that for the time being -- for bad or good -- Hollywood has become the
public's "account of record" for Operation Neptune Spear.
As often happens when the government declines on secrecy grounds to
provide an authoritative account of a controversial event, leaked,
unauthorized and untrustworthy versions rush to fill the void. In this
extraordinary case, a Hollywood film, with apparent White House, CIA, and
Pentagon blessing and despite its historical accuracies, has now become
the closest thing to the official story behind Operation Neptune Spear.
Zero Dark Thirty 's screenwriter, Mark Boal, has claimed that the film is
"a movie not a documentary" and should not be treated as history. But the
U.S. government's widely reported support and its official silence about
the raid have made Zero Dark Thirty (the military designation for 12:30
AM) more than a mere thriller. Today, in an effort to balance the record,
to the extent currently possible, the National Security Archive has
collected, posted, and analyzed in one Electronic Briefing Book all of the
available official documents on the mission to kill the notorious al-Qaeda
leader.
Check out today's posting at the National Security Archive website -
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB410/
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